Business VPN should be dead by now. So why is it still thriving?
If Zero Trust really worked as the industry said, the VPNs would have disappeared years ago. Instead, they are booming. We have all heard the warnings, given the locations of the sellers and read enough linkedin messages to fill several lives: Zero Trust is supposed to be here.
And yet, despite all this media threshing, the corporate VPN market is not only alive – it is flourishing, expected from almost $ 5.7 billion in 2024 to much more than $ 10 billion by 2033.
CEO and co-founder of TailsCale.
Familiar comfort
I wrote my first VPN – Tunnel Vision – In 1998, for the first customer of my first startup. Later, we replaced it with an IPSEC key manager. Then I wrote Sshuttle, a kind of VPN built above SSH. At Google, I ended up writing a multidiffusion VPN tool that we called “Frobnicast” (don’t ask). And finally, I co -founded another VPN company to try to repair this once and for all. So far five VPN has so far. As the same does, we have become extremely effective.
Why do we continue to write new VPNs? Because the ancients are zero. But honestly, it is not only the VPNs that fear – it is TCP / IP which is zero. If IPV4 had been quantified by default and controlled by access from the start and did not miss IP and IPv6 addresses, we would not need VPN. Each generation of these tools has been a bypass solution for something broken later in the battery.
However, companies do not easily let go of familiar tools. I wrote once “not to change things is incredibly powerful as a product strategy”. VPNs are reliable. Or at least, they are the devil we know. They are integrated into corporate security groups, they are in the integration control list, and they were “good enough” long enough for most teams to understand how to live with them.
But when a tool remains long after its design objectives are obsolete – like my old WVDIAL numbering program, decades still popular after modems have become unimportant – it is worth asking why. In the case of Wvdial, the answer was simple: everything else was worse. This story always applies to VPNs.
When the security is embarrassed
According to recent research, this comfort has a cost. More than 83% of engineers admit to bypassing their business security checks simply to do the work. Worse still, 68% retain access to internal systems after leaving their employers, exposing critical gaps in the safety life cycle. However, despite these clear risks, only 10% of professionals estimate that their current VPN “works well”.
Thus, VPNs linger not because they are ideal, but because migration completely towards confidence is not trivial. This is not a product you can buy; It is a change in the way you think. Continuous verification, at least privileged access and a networking ringtone first to simple identity until you try to reorganize them in a 20 -year sprawl computer architecture.
The false VPN idea
There is a common belief that VPNs are fundamentally unsatisfied. This is not the case. But the traditional corporate VPN model, the one that lets you fall inside the perimeter and allows you to walk freely, is dangerous. It is like giving everyone a main key to your office building.
A better model gives a step at a time, depending on who you are, what you need right now and where you come from. Micro -Gegmentation. It is not a question of banning tunnels – these are smaller tunnels, each with their own control valve.
Where zero confidence really starts
The most secure approach is where identity management is everything. Not where you are, not on which subnet you are, not if you are at the office. Identify. Strong authentication, keys to material back, access just in time.
But identity is not easy. Our survey revealed that only 29% of organizations adopted an access control based on large -scale identity. Even less use of automation. Many are always based on spreadsheets and service identification information that overcome the employees that have set them up.
Security therefore becomes a tax. It slows down people. And when security gets into it, people open. This is why VPN fatigue is real – and growing.
However, there is hope. Almost half of the companies questioned consolidate fragmented tools, adopting automation and experimenting with adaptive policies. But more interesting, they start to rethink their entire approach.
The security and engineering teams collaborate instead of competing. They design systems that work with people, not against them. The emerging AI tools – not to replace humans, but to help notice the things that humans are lacking: a sudden change in model, a strange connection time, an unexpected access request.
More and more companies are adopting modular and politician systems. Instead of writing 50 firewall rules, they define the intention: “This type of application speaks to this genre, under these conditions.” It is not zero confidence as a check -up – it is zero confidence as an infrastructure.
An upcoming pragmatic path
Zero Trust is not a product you install. It is a direction in which you enter.
Start by reducing implicit confidence – wherever you find it. Use a strong identity via encryption, not IP addresses. Make short -term references. Suppose the worst. Break your network into areas. Recover the radius of the explosion.
But do it gradually. No one wraps all of their networks in one day. Choose a high value system and zero trustifies. Learn. Repeat.
VPNs will stay for a while, not because they are good, but because everything else is hard or immature. But as we saw with tools like Wvdial, always used long after its time, familiarity is not the same as physical form. The future belongs to systems that embrace the complexity of real access – and make it simple.
I don’t want to write VPN, I don’t want to deploy VPNs, I just want to solve real problems. But we cannot solve real problems without a work network. So I am here with a $ 1.5 billion company that still sells VPNs. Of course, it may be the best VPN. But it seems that I will continue to do it for years, so that other people can finally solve real problems.
And if we finally realize this time, we may stop reinventing the same broken tunnel – a VPN at a time.
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